Tag Archives: university

In my first post about earlier jobs (What I learned from my previous jobs – Part 1), I talked about my teenage jobs delivering papers, trying dishwashing, and even telemarketing, before talking about my first “real” job as a library assistant through my undergrad years. At the end, I said I would cover my law school years next, but in my second post (What I learned from my previous jobs – Part 2), I realized that I hadn’t covered two other computer-related jobs I did while I was working at the library too, so I covered them.

But I did actually leave Peterborough for the bright lights of the big, err, medium city of Victoria. Bigger than Peterborough, obviously, but not like a giant metropolis of Toronto or Vancouver. It still felt “right-size” for me, as did the university.

Many people disagree about what law school is really like, ranging from a Paper Chase model of Socratic method to an apprentice-style world of civil procedure and internships to a Law Review / moot court world of John Grisham-like-protagonist-wannabes. For me, Scott Turow’s One-L is the best portrayal I’ve seen at approximating real life at first year law school. Yet despite those differences in views, everyone agrees on one thing – law school is expensive. More so in the U.S. than Canada, but even back in the late 80s, early 90s, it was still expensive for a graduate study area. I’d love to say that living at home for my undergrad and working full-time allowed me to save up lots of money so I didn’t have to work while at law school, but that is sadly not the case.

g. IT Support (internal) — While I was doing first year law and living on-campus in residence, I also got a job working in the IT support area of the university. I can’t remember the exact number of hours, something like 8-10 a week I think. And because they were also switching over from a mainframe world to the new and exciting worlds of PCs and Macs, the corporate people were still figuring out what services to offer. One that they knew they absolutely needed though was handling software support for faculty and staff, an internal service to help the university run better in the transition. Individual departments could order whatever software they wanted, that was their call, but once it was installed, the IT group had to support it. Sometimes it was something as simple as getting something to print, other times it was conflicts in drivers or corrupted hard drives. But my bosses handled those problems.

What did I do? Installed software for the most part. Yep, that simple. I would go, type install in DOS, start the install program going, and then swap floppy disks as it worked through the install. It was slightly more sophisticated than that, as there were three other issues I started fixing at the same time.

First, I would clean up their file structure…if you have ever looked for anything in a Windows system in the last 10 years, you know that almost all docs are going to be saved in the My Documents area. That’s not just a preference, it was designed so that EVERYBODY knows that is where things are saved. You don’t mix and mingle program files and data files. But back in ’91, that wasn’t as clear to everyone who was not yet IT-literate. So people would think, “Oh, I can install software, it’s simple”, but then when it came time for installation, they would install Word program files in “C:\Betty\letters” despite the fact that Betty wasn’t the only one using the machine, the prog files shouldn’t go there, and they weren’t all about letters. That might not matter too much on your home computer, but in a tech support world for a university, if someone calls, we try to solve it over the phone first – and it is really useful if all the files are saved in the same place by default and not in Betty’s letter files. So we tried to standardize the installs.

Second, I started developing simple scripts that would create the same structures on all the machines for us. I also created docs on procedures that I shared with my boss for confirmation I was doing it right, and they thought they were so great, they had me turn them into instructions for other installers to follow, or that they could give to the various admins who insisted upon installing themselves.

Third, while I was there, I not only tested things, I gave them an extra half-hour of on-site support. Sometimes that was showing them how to print, tweak the settings, etc. Other times it was more open-ended, “Anything else not working the way you want?”. And I would find out that they hadn’t been able to print to one printer for months but never called it in, and so they were using floppy disks to move files over to a separate PC. Often times it was as simple as noting that someone turned off the mechanical print sharer and so the PC literally couldn’t “see” the printer.

My instructions, and the support work I did, made me start to really realize that what I thought were obvious things to do to improve processes and procedures were not obvious to others, or at least, not obvious to them that they should do them. For examples, my bosses had been doing the installs for some time, but never thought to “write it up” in any form. I created the “mini-manual” for myself so I wouldn’t forget or mess up, particularly as the details were complex in some cases, but they not only didn’t necessarily see the need for it before I did it, they also didn’t have the time to do it. Value-added, but a “nice-to-have” for them and not a “must-have”.

For the “extra half-hour”, I was really surprised. While the other installers had taken the approach of “I’m here to install” and nothing more, I noticed that while I was swapping disks, the admin staff frequently would ask me questions that I could answer. Somewhat hesitant at first, they would then open up if I didn’t shut them down. And after about the third round of questions and answers, and probing, I’d suddenly find out that there was this whole other problem that they didn’t know what to do about it, and while they had a solution, it was a pain-in-the-butt. Yet they were just living with it. My bosses were tickled pink because the feedback on my installs was higher than other installers, because I did more than my job required.

I don’t mean I was some IT super hero, I just mean that despite the fact I was paid a minimum salary and I was a student, not university staff, I took it seriously. I thought of ways to make it better. Mind you, my installs took longer sometimes as a result, and sometimes I even generated work for my bosses when I realized that it was something more technical than I could solve. But I at least diagnosed the problem for them, so later they could go in, confirm my diagnosis, and fix the problem in one visit. Solving their IT problem, not just giving a band-aid or Tylenol to get them through the day.

I confess, it is easy to see those trends in my work now, particularly as I’ve been a manager for the last 12 years. Back then, I just initially thought that others were weird that they hadn’t thought to do it on their own…wasn’t it just “obvious”?

h. IT Support (internal and external) – If my difference was starting to show in the first job above that I did for a year and had fun doing, it was really clear when I went back the second year. The IT people had opened a new “IT support office”, where half of it was people who sold basic PC hardware and handled printing, and the other half was manned by students like me who worked part-time providing tech support to both students and faculty/staff on university computer problems. Sometimes MAC, sometimes PC, sometimes mainframe. We wouldn’t solve problems at their home, but if it had anything to do with using something at the university, it was our role to respond.

Was I awesome at the tech support side? Not even close to the others. I was a bit more even — I was good with basic mainframe, okay with MACs, and great with PC. Others were often genius at one, but would hand off the others to someone else. If two or three of us were working simultaneously, we usually had it covered. And if we didn’t, we’d take the info, and have one of our bosses call them back. Rare, but we could.

Yet the part that stood out for me was this stupid little extra task we had that was a major pain in the patootie.

The university sold copies of public domain software, like SPSS to the stats majors. Now, you would just go online and download it yourself. Back then, you came to the university, we would sell you the copy on a cost-recovery basis. What were our costs? Copying it on to several floppy disks in 3.5″ format, burning them, labelling them, putting them in an envelope, and including printed installation instructions. Where did we get those copies to sell? We had to make them.

And therein lay the rub. I’ll give you the solution, as it will seem obvious once you read it.

I would arrive at work, check the inventory, see that we were running low on SPSS or some comms software or something else, format some disks, make up some new ones, print some labels, make up a “package”, and have it ready to go when someone came in. This was ’91 — you did NOT want to have to make them wait while you did all that. And we would do it while we were answering other calls. Then when they came in and bought a copy, we would take their money, make change from a simple little metal money-box (think small metal tool box) with a $20 float in it, and send them along their way. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Except it wasn’t. Nobody knew how to make up the disks, there were no instructions around. There was no price list posted anywhere. The envelopes were on one side of the office, the disks on another, labels in another drawer, instructions on how to install weren’t pre-printed, and nobody knew we were out of copies of a software unless they went to get a copy and found out we were out. No inventory system, no tracking, nothing. Oh, and no training. It was basically word-of-mouth between support workers.

Now, let’s be clear. We weren’t selling tons per week. There was no need for some sophisticated audit trail or control structure here. But by the third or fourth week, it was driving us all insane. And one quiet afternoon on a Friday, I’d had enough. So I just started thinking about how to make it work more easily, and started organizing it.

I grabbed the first piece of software disk, figured out how many disks it would take, created a sub directory structure called something like SPSS 1, SPSS 2, SPSS 3, SPSS 4, etc. on the main machine, and organized the files under it. Then I went on to COMMS 1, COMMS 2, COMMS 3, or whatever. I fixed the file structure.

I made up a simple one-pager that said how many disks each one took, and listed the directories for each disk. It didn’t even take a single page to cover ALL of them with the same procedure i.e. blank disks are stored in cabinet X, you need four for SPSS, 3 for COMMS, etc. Format the disks, copy the files from each directory over, add labels, done.

I made up a price list to go on the front of each envelope — it had the university name and logo, the name of our group, listed the programs, what was in each envelope (instructions plus X disks), and the price. If they were buying multiple things, there was an option to add a total at the bottom. There was no tax, just add it up.

I created a small procedures manual for the office:

When you arrive, check the call log for outstanding tickets that you have an expertise in…answer any you can, with triage for ones you can answer faster than others to keep the outstanding ticket level down and bumping the ones you know need to go to the full tech support (our bosses).

Check the inventory for sales and make up inventory for ones we sold that day;

When you make a sale, put the “receipt” (i.e. the price list form) in the top of the metal box so we know there’s a sale, and can monitor sales/inventory.

Was any of that rocket science? Not in the least. Yet none of the other students were doing it. Nor were my bosses.

And yet, again, I got kudos for doing what I thought was simply obvious improvements. My bosses thought I was “outstanding”, and loved my initiative. And my coworkers? Over the moon because suddenly it MADE SENSE what they were supposed to do. Did they all suddenly flock to doing it? Not completely, but it was better than we had it before. And less likely for cash-strapped students to be pocketing the cash and not recording a sale. Again, not high dollars, but basic bookkeeping.

As I said above, I can see why this was deemed to be different, but at the time, I just didn’t understand how things that seemed so basic, so simple, so obvious that not only could they be done by anyone, but that anyone could go ahead and actually do it. So I did. I wasn’t “fixing” things, I was just avoiding chaos cuz I was anal-retentive, or so I thought.

In my previous post (What I learned from my previous jobs – Part 1), I covered my first four jobs up until I headed off to law school. In doing so, I did go chronologically, but I skipped over two small jobs in there as they overlapped my job at the library, and I was focused on telling that part of the story. However, the others are worth mentioning.

E. Assistant to the Treasurer — My girlfriend at the time had ties to the local Anglican church, and the wife of the Canon was the Treasurer to the Canadian Gerontological Nursing Association. Nice lady, but not particularly computer savvy beyond Word Processing, etc., and I had my own computer plus the know-how and software to run spreadsheets and print mailing labels, etc. I had struggled to get a job out of high school, including the library one, and I was looking for more experience to round out my work history. I didn’t know at the time that I would be working in the library pretty much full-time for four years, so I volunteered to be her assistant.

Generally speaking, that meant maintaining a database showing what type of member each person was (full, associate, etc.), how much they paid and when (i.e. for which membership year), and we would print out labels so she could mail them forms and newsletters, etc. It wasn’t particularly arduous, but it was interesting. I got to see how a small organization could automate certain things, at a time when, to be honest, there wasn’t a lot of computers in active use in organizations like that. Now, sure, it would all be online, but back then, even confirmations were sent by fax or paper mail. It was a way to apply my skills from my work training to a new area, and to actually “DO” something with the skills beyond my own papers for school, etc.

Did it give me any amazing insights or skills for future jobs? Nope. But it did help me think of something that was like the serials job…I really liked helping people do something that was annoying or time-consuming for them, but relatively easy for me. Value-added assistance again, although I didn’t really recognize it as such at the time. I liked being “responsible” too for some things…I had to maintain the database, cuz if I didn’t, no one else was going to do it. And she trusted me to do it. Win-win.

F. Computer lab assistant — I have to point out that the year was 1989, and the job continued until 1990 or so. Which I’m flagging because this was still pretty early adoption for PCs. Lots of computers were being used for programming, etc., and I had bought an IBM XT clone for home use (couldn’t afford the faster AT/80286 clones) in ’87 or ’88. The university had lots of computer labs around, all running off the mainframe. It wasn’t even that many years since punch cards had still been in use, not really. Yet the university put together a computer lab with IBM computers, networked them to some shared printers, and installed MSDOS, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and dBase IV. My job was to basically monitor the room at night, twice a week, and help people when they had problems with the network or printing or formatting or whatever. It wasn’t that difficult a gig the first semester as there was NO ONE using the machines. They didn’t know how, for the most part. Heck, I doubt most students even knew it was there. It should have been in the library (a future location for another lab), but at the time, it was in one of the colleges on campus.

However, by the second semester, word had gotten out somehow to the local business community that the lab was there, and somehow, some way, an external teacher came and used the lab to run training for bank employees at night. If they completed the course, the bank paid for the course. Most of the students were bank tellers looking to expand their skill set, and with it being a totally covered course, we filled the lab easily. I say, “we”, but officially I was supposed to be just tech support. The teacher was running the course actually four nights a week (M/W and Tu/Th), but I was only working for two of the nights (Tu/Th). The student who worked M/W sat in the corner and only helped out if the systems crashed or the printer jammed.

I was more, umm, engaged. Or as the instructor told me, “co-teaching”. The course wasn’t detailed, it was an “intro to applications” course, before the word applications was really used. She started with a quick overview explaining what DOS, WordPerfect, Lotus, and dBase were for, and showed them the programs the first night. The other nights were about theory at the beginning and then exercises they could do to learn how to do different things. Typical learning approach for the time.

The second night was all about DOS. How to format a disk, for example. Save files, move files, erase files — gasp (!). They worked in banks — you NEVER erase anything, ever! Everybody got it, except one woman. She didn’t understand it, she didn’t get it at all. She interrupted every two minutes, she was afraid to touch keys, the class went downhill fast. I went and helped her for a bit, but honestly, she was an idiot. I was convinced she was actually certifiably stupid. She couldn’t follow the most basic of instructions. Every tech support person has met people like this and wondered how they got dressed that morning. And, this woman worked in a BANK! With money!

The third and fourth nights were WordPerfect. It was DOS-based, sure, not the lovely graphical user interfaces you have now with every wordprocessor program/application being almost identical. But it was a blank page. You type. Like a letter in a typewriter. Which she knew how to do. Supposedly. Again, it was a nightmare. Every thing she did, she did wrong. I finally gave up on helping anyone else, and I literally sat beside her the WHOLE night and helped her with every question she had so she wouldn’t interrupt the teacher and the rest of the class could keep going. After the classes, the teacher kept thanking me profusely, and honestly, I had earned it. There was no language barrier, the process was simple, the student just couldn’t grasp it.

The fifth and six nights were Lotus. Basic spreadsheet, and I thought, “Okay, she works in a bank, she should get this.” Nope. Didn’t understand formulas, didn’t understand tables. It was also DOS-based, so again, not a pretty menu, but it’s pretty basic…table, data, totals. We weren’t doing lookups or complicated scenario reports. Again, all night, I sat beside her. Other students were starting to get ticked at her because I was helping her all night, and they thought she was too stupid to even be there.

The seventh and last night was dBase IV, and to be perfectly honest, I was dreading it. If I could have phoned in sick and had someone to cover for me (there was NO ONE to cover, if I wasn’t there, the lab was closed), I might have bailed. I couldn’t imagine how the night would go. NOBODY ever understood dBase. It was a complete and utter pig to work with. The interface wasn’t intuitive. In fact, the structure of some report functions was not just opaque or non-intuitive, it was often actually fully counter-intuitive.

The student listened while the teacher talked, and was nodding her head the whole time. No questions. Very suspicious, I thought. Was she high or something? I’d find out when the practical exercises started.

She took the exercises, started in. Type type type, click click click, done the first one. Umm, okay. That’s weird.

Type type type, click click click, done the second one. Then the third and the fourth. Full report completed for the fifth. She did all five while most people were fighting with the first. And then ran around and helped everyone who was struggling with theirs. WTF?

She got it perfectly. Entries. Updates. Reports. It made perfect sense to her because that was what her job was at the bank. She hadn’t used dBase before, but she did understand what a database was and essentially how it worked. She couldn’t work any of the other programs to save her life, but dBase was a breeze to her.

The teacher and I were blown away. She wasn’t stupid, we just hadn’t found a way to reach her the first six nights. No common reference, no link, no inroad to her experience. While I had some awareness of learning styles, etc., I had never seen it so starkly portrayed when it came to learning a technical skill like using software.

For me, that alone was worth taking the job. That realization that she may seem like she wasn’t able to tie her own shoes, but she did have expertise, we just had to find it. I didn’t have enough evidence to evaluate teaching methodology as it had worked fine for everyone else, and we didn’t have any problem like that the next semester (plus I was there only one night of the teaching course).

However, the other thing for me was seeing the reaction of the teacher. It never occurred to me NOT to help with the mentoring, teaching, problem solving. It never occurred to me that really I was just being paid to sit on my butt and read while she did her job. Or to work on my own school work. So I helped. And the teacher was asking my bosses if there was a chance I could be scheduled on the same nights as her class because it was so much better for her workload. I don’t think I had ever been “requested” before like that, that I had any inkling that I didn’t work like “other people”, that I approached a simple job with a different mentality than other students. Some of that seems to be internal to me, and shows up later, but some of it was just a result of my work at the library. I had learned to be a team player, to pitch in, to help, not just to do my own job and that’s it. To do my job reliably like it mattered, even if I wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

I mentioned in my previous post (Starting the Official Job Search of 2017), that I’m looking for a new job this year. And since I want this to be a “good search” that reflects my true interests and desires, I have been reflecting on ALL of my previous jobs to see what they tell me about myself and what I might be looking for in 2017.

A. Paper delivery boy — Yep, I delivered the Shoppers’ Market and the Peterborough Examiner when I was a teenager. I took over the Shoppers’ Market (think Kijiji on paper) route from my brother and it was pretty sweet. It literally covered my immediate neighbourhood — one block south, one block west, one block east and two blocks north. There wasn’t a perfect route that didn’t involve either some criss-crossing or doubling-back, but it was once a week, and they did direct deposit into a bank account. No collecting.

Later I had three different Examiner routes, all late afternoon and it ran Monday to Saturday (no Sunday paper). While many people did paper routes and say later they learned about dependability, or value for money, etc., my lessons were not so positive. It gave me my own money, which was good, but there was a serious limit to what you could make. Even my last two routes, which were in apartment buildings, allowed me to handle some 85 papers at once, but it still wasn’t as much as you could make in a real part-time job. Wednesdays sucked when they had all the ads; Thursdays were collections, and I had to frequently chase people; and lots of people didn’t have the $2 or so to pay me. Separate from the reality check, I learned that a) I never really wanted to be dependent upon “piecework” for my rate of pay (hourly wage or salary, but not piecework); b) I’d rather worry about something other than the “transaction” at the front-line; and c) some people are going to crap on you or make your day, and you can choose how you are going to respond (a lesson that I still need to learn and relearn daily).

B. Dishwasher — I filled in one night at a restaurant for my brother. He worked as a dishwasher and also did basic kitchen / stock room cleaning when he finished the dishes. It seemed like mindless work to me, and obviously not what I wanted to do with my life when I was planning on university, maybe law school, etc. But he needed someone to fill in, and it paid more than I got delivering papers. I was arrogant enough to think it would be relatively easy, and instead, I was a near disaster.

He normally started at 6 or so, I think, and handled the dinner rush. He would then finish up, clean the back area, and basically be good to leave by about 10:30. At 11:00, I was still slogging through the dishes and glasses that never slowed down. I cleaned up, swabbed the floors, and I was beat. I left just after 1:00 a.m., walked home, and collapsed. I felt completely useless. A job that was the bottom of the totem pole, and I couldn’t even do it. I was supposed to go back another night, but I refused. I learned the same lesson I had from the paper route — my money/career/living was never going to amount to anything if I was relying on physical labour or transactions to do it. I needed something that was more geared to my one and only skill — my intellect.

But there was something I didn’t know, and I didn’t even find out until many years later…because my brother was ticked at me for not going back the second night, he didn’t tell me. Apparently, he was just enough faster than me that by the time he finished the dinner rush and got the back area clean, he could go home — before all the night-time plates and glasses came back from the bar. I was slower, not egregiously so, but slower, and so I was still there when all the “extra” stuff came back. So I washed it. All of it. Cuz that was the job as I understood it. What the reality had been however was that I actually did all the work of the dishwasher who would come in the next morning and clean up the bar stuff from the night before. When he came in the next day, he had nothing to do for the first few hours, as I had already done it. THAT’s why I was so much slower — I did two jobs!

C. Telemarketing — I actually did this for a whopping, wait for it, five days. I was between high school and university, and I needed cash desperately. I had already decided to live at home and go to Trent, not figuring I had many other financial options, and I was struggling to find anybody that would hire me for anything. I had nothing in the way of useful experience, see above. I had had an interview at the university in the library, but hadn’t heard anything yet, so I took the telemarketing job with a friend. He was good at it, I hated it with a passion and sucked. I lasted five days selling circus tickets, and only had a handful of sales. Again, a transaction-based job. Another area, like piecework for paper delivery, that I was never going to excel at quickly. I quit because I got another job, but I was on the line of being fired anyway (they had a quota each night to meet, which wasn’t high, it was just their break-even point for paying you vs. revenue from sales). My friend did it for the full run and made good money. Having been on the inside, you might think I would have some sympathy for those who call the house, and I’m okay with a few, but most (like the duct cleaning services) are just parasites who ignore the DO NOT CALL list.

D. Serials Assistant, University Library — My GF found out about a job at the university and applied for it, but referred me to it too. There were only a handful of us who applied, and they were looking for someone to work in the serials and periodicals section of the university library for July and August. I’d like to say I got the job because I was the best candidate, but in reality, I got it because I was going to be attending the same university in the fall, and the other applicants weren’t. The “story” just worked for them — they liked the idea I was going to be a Trent student, that they were “hiring a Trent student”, even if I hadn’t started yet. I loved the job, and I stayed for four years. They hired me full-time in summers and part-time through the school year. They were flexible on my hours around my classes, and I became one of the team slowly but surely. I am not exaggerating when I say that much of who I am as a worker in any job came from my experiences at the university.

I started out small…I was basically opening and sorting the mail, and after it was checked in by the full-time staffer, I would put it on the shelf. The records were all in paper, and were super important. Nothing could be missed. We kept excellent records, in a way that only a library can appreciate. We knew when we got every issue, which ones hadn’t arrived, it was all recorded. There was this amazing filing cabinet with pull-out drawers that were only about the size of a small book turned sideways…the catalog came out, the end dropped down to the pull-out table, and voila, an accordion-style set of cards that you could lift up, enter your info, and move on. A book lover’s dream, more so than any card catalogue could ever be. This was real, this was raw! THIS was a library!

I learned about computers…used WordPerfect and Lotus. We were just starting to switch over to digital records, and I even sent my first email. 1988. To another university of course, asking if they had any issues of some magazines we were missing our copies of, and they replied and sent them to us through inter-university mail. It was awesome!

But the two things that stood out for me above all else were (a) the value-added nature of my work and (b) the people.

I was an assistant in title and in function. My job, obviously, was to assist, but more importantly, it was to help them do their jobs more easily. I did the grunt work — opening and sorting the mail would take a staff member 25-30 minutes and slow her down from actual recording of the entries. Similarly with shelving. If I did the opening and initial sorting, and the shelving, she was free to do other work, or even the recording with more time to follow up with something if there was a problem (often simple, like issue 4 arrived but issue 3 had never come, which would require noting and a request to the publisher to resend, but would slow her down if she was also doing other things).

I took on projects. There was a set of titles with missing issues on a special set of shelves — four or five titles per shelf, six shelves per bay, maybe around 16-20 bays. Some 600 titles, some with multiple issues missing…we couldn’t bind them with missing issues, there was no room to put them in the periodicals area just loosely, so they sat with us. Students couldn’t access them without asking for them, and I knew most wouldn’t bother. And there was no time for anyone to follow-up to see if we could find issues elsewhere. So, one summer, I spent a few hours each week to work on it as a “weed the beast” project. Over the course of a summer, I got it all down to less than five bays. I wrote letters, I wrote emails, I called other universities. I begged, borrowed and cajoled copies of issues to complete our collections, sent them for bindery, and put them in the stacks where they belonged. There was some internal metric, probably number of titles, and I reduced it from something like 600 down to less than 100 at one point. It’s a never ending war of attrition, but it was a source of frustration for the library and the staff I was working around. For them, it was like a Christmas present to have someone do it. Which I did on my own initiative. I had permission, but it was my idea, my project. I loved being helpful…it made other people’s jobs easier, even if I wasn’t doing anything glamourous or important, and I loved doing it. Value-added work, however minor or trivial in level, is pretty dang addictive. And everyone loved the work I was doing. Another bonus.

The other area was the people. I am NOT an extrovert, no matter what some people might think. I am, and have always, been an introvert. Yet in a role where I have formal structures, I can be a bit more liberated. In the library, I would frequently have something in our area that had to go over to fragile documents, the reference section, acquisitions, circulation or reference. Even archives or the mail room or the head librarian’s office. I jumped to do it…because I got to meet more people and see a bit of what their job was about, what they were working on from time to time. Not in an obnoxious way, just chatting as I dropped things off. I got to know everybody in the building, without trying to do so. I was just curious, and lord knows I like to talk, so I got to meet people across the library.

Here’s the thing. When I “quit”, after university in order to go off to law school, my team suggested we have a “going away lunch” for me. Sure, sounds good, I thought. They asked if other people could come too, which also sounded good. Particularly as one of my previous bosses had moved jobs and was in another section now, so she could come too. I expected, maybe five people. Then I found out acquisitions was coming, so I thought, “Maybe 10”. There were over 30 people there. Almost the entire library came. I felt overwhelmed. I was just a student. And ALL these people wanted to come to my farewell lunch. And it wasn’t like it was right next door, you had to drive 20 minutes to get there. They all came. The library was practically shut down — the only people left running it were mostly students, and some of them had to be told they couldn’t come too. I was a little self-conscious too, since I knew a staffer in the library had retired after 30 years the week before, and only about six or seven people even knew who she was and went to her lunch.

Looking back, it is easy to see how I connected with them and why they would come. Because I was helpful. Because I was nice. Because I was curious about their jobs and what they did, and asked questions about them. I wasn’t simply cashing a pay cheque and heading for the door. Because I liked them.

Between the addictive nature of value-added work, and liking my coworkers, I seriously considered doing a Masters in Library Science degree when I finished my undergrad. I even considered becoming a systems librarian, as it was going to be the future. I just didn’t know if there was much of a job market for librarians.

So, instead, I chose law school. How did that work out for me? I’ll let you know in the next post…

I like reading the Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA) blog even though most of it is about education administration. Their recent post is about “Carleton’s Loyalty Oath” and basically outlines how Carleton University’s Board of Governors is struggling to address the behaviour of one professor on its board. To the blog’s eye, they’re behaving like “goons” and thugs. The issue surrounds Root Gorelick as the university faculty’s representative to the Board of Governors (BoG). He represents the faculty and feels he should blog to the community about the discussions, his positions, and even his objections to Board decisions.

Yet part of being part of ANY board (co-op, school council, parliament, NGO, business, etc.) is joint responsibility. You individually contribute to joint discussions, you exercise your personal voting powers, but you make collective decisions. And once a group makes a decision, the members of that group collectively made that decision. It’s even part of your legal responsibility in some cases. And the short version is that if you cannot abide by the group’s decisions, you resign as a member of the Board. That’s the job. Since Gorelick hasn’t come to heel at the Board’s insistence, the Board is revising the Code of Conduct to make it a formally recognized duty.

While the HESA blog finds this overkill, and likely to “reduce transparency”, I find the opposite. If the history of Board governance shows anything, it is that when one member violates group confidentiality, the risk goes way up that MORE will be done in secret. The blog (and Gorelick) equate transparency as only being about reporting “out” on discussions, but there are two elements that are far more dangerous if curtailed.

First, if Board members have a “safe space” in which to discuss things openly among themselves, they are more likely to do so. If they know instead that every word they say may be blogged about tomorrow, then they won’t. That has been consistently proven again and again. It is why the informal rule of “group responsibility” exists in all boards. They need to know they are “in this together”, working together for the common good. And if one member falters in a single decision, the others won’t hang them out to dry. If it is “open season”, then board members consistently stop working together and default to formal positions. Zero risk taking on any issue. Everybody represents only their clear constituency, with no room for compromise or shared positions.

Second, and far more dangerous to any Board, is that people will not BRING issues to the table if they think they’ll immediately go public. They’ll hold them back, they’ll try to “manage” risks or scandals or problems until there is nothing for the Board to do but a post-mortem. Every Board functions the same way — they want things to come early, so they can exercise their governance role and give early direction. But if the administration knows that it will risk early disclosure by one member, nothing controversial will come to the board. Instead, it’ll come either only after it has been “handled” or it’ll get completely buried.

Like the HESA blog author, I too am a Carleton alumni, and in Public Policy. But I support them getting a rep from faculty that has a clue how governance actually works rather than running around as a self-appointed Chief Executive Grumpy Pants.

The college professor had just finished explaining an important research project to his class. He emphasized that this paper was an absolute requirement for passing his class, and that there would be only two acceptable excuses for being late. Those were a medically certifiable illness or a death in the student’s immediate family. A smart ass student in the back of the classroom waved his hand and spoke up.

“But what about extreme sexual exhaustion, professor?”

As you would expect, the class exploded in laughter. When the students had finally settled down, the professor froze the young man with a glaring look.

“Well,” he responded, “I guess you’ll just have to learn to write with your other hand.”

Way back in the dark ages of high school, I took a course that was an introduction to psychology and sociology. I don’t remember what it was called, and I seem to think it was supposed to be one or the other, but ended up being done as a combination when enrolment was low. I don’t remember that much from the course. It was okay, semi-interesting, but it didn’t compel me to want to do a degree in it or anything. Later, when I had electives available in university, it didn’t make my list. Mind you, that was some 30 years ago, when I think they still lobotomized people to let their demons out, so probably not all that useful to me even if I had taken it. 🙂

But as I got older and went through difficult periods in my life, or even just large periods of change and self-reflection, I started to think more and more about how the brain works, how personalities develop, how people misuse their brain to trick themselves into ways of thinking that are not optimal, efficient or even helpful. Self-sabotaging behaviour that your brain either hides or actively encourages vs. ways it helps itself heal. Some moments in my life stand out.

First and foremost was my change in “who I was” going from high school to university to law school to working stiff, through my “tadpole years” of self-reflection and change, and who I became. What pieces were engrained, immutable, part of my bedrock personality and how did they become so? Nature vs. nurture, on a micro-level.

Second, there was the loss of my parents. Similarities in experience yet vast differences too. Was it my age? Change in my support network? Had I just grown more?

Third, the elements of family. I was the youngest of six kids. I discount most of the pop psych about birth order, mostly because I think psych is about individuals, not statistics about groups, but I find one area intriguing. Growing up, I didn’t know my one brother very well. He moved out of the house when I was 5 or 6, and I didn’t interact with him a lot in the next 20 years. It wasn’t like we didn’t see each other, but we were never “close”. In fact, of my five siblings, I would say he was the farthest away in relations. Yet, when we reconnected when I was 30 and he was 40, we experienced a natural bond we had never felt before. It happened over dinner one night — a dinner that almost didn’t happen. He was in town for work, and it wasn’t like “Oh, obviously we’ll do this or that together.” It was more like, “Hey, so, he’s in town. We should probably see each other. Maybe dinner or something?”. Very tentative, like, we *should* do something, shouldn’t we? Wouldn’t most siblings see each other if they were in town? Yeah, we agreed on dinner. And part of the night was like we were finishing each other’s sentences. Even though we have led very different lives — he had been married, had six kids, was very independent early in life, and had been in the military for 20 years; I was the pampered youngest child, not married, no kids, lived at home up until law school — there was an immediate real connection, way beyond friendship, beyond just family. Like somehow our souls knew each other from some other time and place and met up for a beer. Now, I consider him one of my closest siblings and friends. How do our different yet similar beginnings produce vastly different lives and outcomes yet our psyches retain some common elements that look like genetics? Again, nurture vs. nature. Equally, I’ve heard lots of people talk about how they’ve always been close to a sibling, while I’ve been close to different siblings at different parts of my life — close to my next-oldest sibling, a brother, when I was young, say up to age 14; close to my second-oldest sibling in my late teen years; close to my oldest sister and her son when I came back from university and up until my Dad died, and then again more recently; close to my other sister, third oldest, after my dad died and for a number of years afterwards; and closest to my “middle” brother (fourth-oldest) as mentioned above. A wax-and-wane type experience.

Fourth, I became an aspiring writer. I need to know how to access the psyche of a fictional character, how to get into their head and write what THEY would do, not what I would do if I was pretending to be them. To figure out how to flesh the character out fully — the role of hero, villain, mistress, husband — and how to make them real, not names or formulaic archetypes.

Lastly, I became a husband and a father within the same year. Huge changes in my life and in my roles as a person. What role does my behaviour play in my son’s development? He has had some physical challenges, and almost everything he has faced, regardless of what we have done to help him, it really is just him overcoming them on his own. Outgrowing some stuff, ignoring others, figuring out the rest. We help, but the biggest difference over time is just him being awesome. Is it just nature?

All of which has led to a renewed interest in psychology. I don’t want to do a full degree, with electives, exams, papers, etc. I just want the knowledge, not a piece of paper to certify it. And while I can find it just about anywhere (library, internet, Amazon, etc.), what I really wanted is what I always want when looking at a new area — curated content. The fruits of the labour of someone who has already trod the same path before me, who says, “Here is a good framework to understand an issue” and “Here’s some stuff you should read”. I may develop strong interest in certain areas of psychology like child development, but to start, I really wanted a good overview to show me the whole canvas, not the exciting brush strokes in one corner.

Instead of just buying a textbook and reading it, I found a free online psych course, with credentials behind it to reassure me it’s not some quack throwing stuff up on a blog (hey, wait a minute, says my id, but we’ll ignore him for now).